The time she baked me a cake. My best friend is a great listener. To be friends with me this past thirty-seven years, she’d have to be. I can be a bit of a windbag. I’m owning it. Unlike me who sometimes spits out words without tasting them first, she chooses her words carefully. She gets why I worry about my special girl. And she knows I’ve struggled to come to terms with the realities of having a child with special needs. She understands how the life I imagined for myself is both exactly and not at all what I had expected. As we sat in her garden, sipping wine, I told her about a family I met several years ago whose daughter then, reminds me so much of my daughter now. My Avery was just a toddler when I met this family at an activity group for kids with a variety of special needs. The girl was about nine—the age Avery is now. She, like Avery, didn’t have any dysmorphic features. At first glance, she appeared pretty typical. It was when she spoke that the disparity between her chronological and developmental age was[…]